Berlin Journal; The Workers' State, as It Was Painted (Badly)

By STEPHEN KINZER,

Published: June 16, 1994

BERLIN, June 15 -- A portrait of the late former East German leader Erich Honecker painted on the skin of an Ethiopian wild boar is at the center of a new debate over who should inherit property that belonged to the East German Communist Party.

No one claims that the portrait, which was given to Mr. Honecker by Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, is anything other than laughable kitsch. But behind the debate lie serious political and artistic questions.

After the collapse of Communist rule in East Germany in 1990, the post-Communist East German Parliament ordered the Communist Party and its affiliated "mass organizations" to surrender much of their property. Leaders of the Democratic Socialist party, as the reformed Communists now call themselves, agreed to surrender some property and money, but are fighting to keep the rest.

Court battles may ultimately decide who has rights to hundreds of millions of dollars that the Communists accumulated through party dues, and to choice buildings like the party headquarters in eastern Berlin. The dispute over Mr. Honecker's pigskin portrait may be a preview of those contests.

Among the items that the Democratic Socialists inherited from their Communist predecessors were more than 400 works of art. Some were painted by East German artists favored by the Government; others were gifts from foreign leaders and visiting delegations. Although a few of the better ones now hang in the offices of Democratic Socialist leaders, most are unwanted.

But last week, the agency established to control and dispose of property formerly owned by the East German state demanded that the Democratic Socialists hand over their art collection. The agency has assembled nearly 12,000 art works that formerly hung in public buildings in East Germany, and says it wants the rest for safekeeping while it decides what to do with them.

All parties to the dispute agree that most of the art works are highly uninteresting and will probably end up gathering dust in storage depots no matter who owns them. But the Democratic Socialists have refused to turn over their collection, declaring that it is their property.

"We would be happy to give the collection to a museum, but only voluntarily, not under pressure from the privatization agency," said Hanno Harnisch, a Democratic Socialist spokesman. "We are trying to make the point that we still have some rights in this country."

"The privatization agency came in here in 1990 and took an inventory of everything we have, every chair and every typewriter," Mr. Harnisch said. "They knew about these paintings then. But now that we are in an election campaign, they suddenly choose to make an issue of this. They are trying to paint us as desperately trying to hold on to art works that don't belong to us. It is purely a political move."

Leaders of mainstream German parties are anxious to do whatever possible to prevent the Democratic Socialists from winning seats in the Parliament that is to be elected in October. With the benefit of one-time-only rules imposed after unification, they won seats in the present Parliament. But if they are to return, they will have to take 5 percent of the vote nationwide, or win outright in at least three electoral districts.

Seeking to capitalize on what the German press calls "the wild-pig Honecker debate," the Democratic Socialists have mounted an exhibit of several dozen of the disputed art works. Critics say some have artistic merit, but most are unappealing and even repulsive works of Socialist Realism. The exhibitors evidently want to suggest that the privatization agency is foolishly making a fuss about works in which it has no real interest.

Among the works on display are many portraits of Communist heroes. Marx, Engels and Lenin are represented, of course. There are a variety of portraits of Mr. Honecker, the Communist leader who died last month, including one showing him with Leonid I. Brezhnev and another with Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whose reform policies doomed the hard-line Honecker Government.

The privatization agency, stung by what seems to be a propaganda victory for the Democratic Socialists, has sought to defend its demand that the pictures be surrendered.

"We are not interested in piles of pictures, and no one here likes Socialist Realism," insisted Wold Schode, a spokesman for the agency. "This is a matter of law and legal rights."

Among the issues behind the debate is whether East Germany produced any worthwhile art at all. A museum director in Stuttgart, Werner Schmalenbach, touched off the debate soon after unification by asserting that he would never hang a single painting made in East Germany because all of its art was "cloying, rigid and provincial." The art historian Hans Belting urged that East German art "be consigned to storehouses as quickly as we flushed Nazi art out of our consciousness."

Some East German artists who strongly supported and were supported by the Communist Government now say they were quietly pressing for reform within the cultural associations they dominated.

"I am astonished to learn from interviews with these people how many resistance fighters there were within our associations," said Willi Sitte, one formerly Communist painter who has refused to renounce his past and is now a Democratic Socialist. "They carried out their resistance so skillfully that nobody noticed it."

Photo: Berliners are talking about East Germany's taste in official art. As a dispute simmers over ownership of the art works, an exhibit has been mounted. At center is a portrait of Erich Honecker painted on boar skin. (Christian Schulz/Paparazzi, for The New York Times)